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St Mary,
Houghton-on-the-Hill

I
first visited this church about ten years ago, in
the company of a group of church enthusiasts. I
hadn't even thought then of embarking on the task
of visiting every Norfolk church, let alone of
creating this site to document that journey. Perhaps this was where the first
germ of the idea came to me. At the time, St Mary
was just about the the most famous church in
Norfolk, appearing in the national press and on
television. Since then, it has settled into a
somewhat quieter retirement, but it is still very
difficult to be alone here.

When Arthur Mee came this way in the
late 1930s, St Mary was a small, almost derelict
church on a bald hill above the road between
South and North Pickenham. It had suffered damage
in the First World War when a returning Zeppelin
dumped its bombs into the churchyard. Mee found
the chancel ruinous, and the top of the tower
open to the sky. There was a cottage beside it,
and a farmhouse across a field. The last baptism
had been in 1933, the last wedding eight years
earlier.

Within ten years, the cottage and
farmhouse had both gone, as the whole of England came
under intense cultivation, and St Mary found itself a
parish with no inhabitants at all. With no proper road
leading to the hamlet, and in an area severely curtailed
by the presence of American Air Forces, it was abandoned.
After the war, thickets of trees and brambles reclaimed
the hillside, and this was just another lost Norfolk
church, one of many.

The story goes that in the hot summer of 1992, members of
North Pickenham WI were on a ramble in these hills when
they stopped for a rest on the edge of the graveyard of
St Mary's. One of the number, a woman called Gloria
Davey, was intrigued by gravestones among the thickets,
and cleared a path into the churchyard itself. There, she
found St Mary a ruin, all the roofs now gone, and the
entire shell encased in ivy. She climbed in, and was
horrified to discover what she called 'signs of Satanic
worship'. When she got home, she told her husband, North
Pickenham churchwarden Bob Davey. The next day, he went
and took a look, and decided to organise a series of
watches to deter night time visitors. More significantly,
he got onto Norfolk County Council and ensured that St
Mary was added to the 'Buildings at Risk' register, an
important step to setting in motion a process of repair,
and attracting funding. The county, we may assume, were
relieved to find a local with so much interest and
energy, and were happy to agree.

Over the next ten years, Bob Davey spent every waking
moment bringing St Mary back from the dead. He cleared
the graveyard, made the floors safe and cleared all the
rubble from the site. Norfolk Archeological Service
became interested, and when an architect came to look he
felt it would be possible to rebuild a roof on the old
timbers rather than building an entirely new one. By now,
Bob had already organised open-air services in the empty
shell, but the addition of a roof meant it was worth
doing something about the walls.

This was when something extraordinary happened. Under the
crumbly Victorian plaster were found painted texts from
Elizabethan times - and under them, a vast array of wall
paintings from the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries. And
under them, amazing things; for here, on this quiet
little hilltop, is one of the best sequences of late
Saxon wall-paintings in western Europe. Immediately, the
big guns came in - the Courtauld Institute, English
Heritage, other national heritage and archaeological
organisations, and, most important of all, funding
bodies. The most significant painting is that over the
chancel arch, which depicts the Trinity as part of a last
judgement. It is believed to be the earliest
representation of the Trinity in this form. Incredibly,
pigments used include cinnabar, perhaps the most
expensive of all at the time. How on earth did it end up
being used here? All around are arrays of apostles and
angels, a glorious Holy Mother of God, the Saints of
heaven in all their glory. For a moment, modern nations
fall away, and we are anywhere in Europe or north Africa
at the dawn of the second millennium.

The church is, inevitably, very
crisp and restored in appearance. You enter from the
west, beneath the tower. You step through the tower arch
into the enchanting interior. Through the chancel arch, a
tiny truncated apse just has room for its altar. Work
still continues apace, both on interpreting and
preserving the wall paintings, and on gradually replacing
the windows, which were repaired urgently and temporarily
early on. Bob Davey traced the former font to a garden in
a nearby village, and brought it back. It isn't
particulary fine, but it is, at last, home. One of the
two bells (the other is now at Swaffham) was also
returned. During the early part of the restoration there
was another attack of vandalism when the ledger stone in
the centre of the nave was broken open. This was repaired
with cement, but perhaps needs to be left cracked and
broken as a reminder to us all of how vulnerable these
places can become if we neglect them.

St Mary is now probably
the most looked-after church in Norfolk. Visitors
come from all over the world, and it is used
regularly for services by all denominations from
traditionalist Catholic to Pentecostal, but it is
still Bob Davey's baby. When I first met him soon
after the start of the Millennium, he was
regularly appearing on television programmes and
being interviewed by newspapers and magazines.
The Prince of Wales, who takes a great interest
in medieval churches, came and took a look. Not
long after, Bob Davey was awarded the MBE.

"I have a feeling this was
meant to be", he told me in 2003, "St
Mary's is now my life". He has collected a
huge fund of stories about the church and former
village, past and present, some more likelier
than others. He still spends part of most
days up here, and he has converted the churchyard
into a surreally suburban garden, which won't be
to everybody's taste I think. However, the
churchyard is used for the interment of ashes,
and there is at least one recent burial.

Today, Bob Davey is in his
eighties, and is supported by a team of locals
and enthusiasts in his mission to spread the word
about St Mary on the Hill. The church is always
open from 2pm to 4pm, seven days a week. If you
come here and it is one of his days, he will show
you around with as much enthusiasm and interest
as he did the Prince of Wales, because he loves
this building, and he's that kind of bloke.